By Amina Mama
Keep expanding your horizon, decolonise your mind, and cross over borders. (Kochiyama, 1996)
Introduction
Fifteen years since the launch of the first issue on Intellectual Politics in 2002, this special editorial marks the end of the first stage in Feminist Africa’s life. The shared founding principle behind FA is the understanding that building strong and independent feminist movements is necessary for the liberation of our continent. Movement-building demands the mobilisation of multiple energies that work to demystify, resist and overcome the sex- and gender-based oppressions at work in our lives and communities, and in the institutions we inhabit. Conscientisation is a dynamic dialectical relationship between radical thinking and action.1 It takes integrity and courage to listen across boundaries, to hear and respect the multiple languages of gender and sexuality, marked by the striations of other dimensions of power and status. Unless we link collective organising with coherent feminist consciousness informed by sound theories of gender oppression and change, we easily become subject to an identity politics that will keep us divided. By strengthening feminist consciousness, we strengthen the collective “will to change” that we express through activism.
Feminist Africa Issue 22: Feminists Organising - Strategy, Voice, Power, Journal, Special Editorial